Our Manifestos

What Marketeers Can Learn From Skype - Part II

This is the second part of an article looking at what the marketing industry can learn from Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the men behind Kazaa, Skype and now Joost. You can find the first half here.

So what can the marketing industry learn from P2P and the incredible journey of TCS? Well let’s take a flight of fantasy and instead of seeing those little nodes as technical points on an ubergeek wall chart, think of them as people. Better yet, think of them as customers. Now, until very recently those customers have been unable to easily find one another and relied upon brands to simplify a busy marketplace by providing trusted signs. Supported by gazillions of media bucks, the brands became bigger...

..and bigger providing magnificent profits to shareholders and creating
mega-corps like Gillette, Coke and P&G along the way.

But as
everyone now knows, networked media means that those customer nodes are
starting to connect together. Now if you want to find out about a
product you no longer have to go to the company. Just visit a recommendation
engine like Reevoo and see what real punters think of it. If you want
to complain about a product you can quickly find a sympathetic
audience online. As Matthew Pieterson famously did when he found himself
dismissed by Apple when complaining about a faulty Nano product. The
resulting comment storm went global and quickly forced Apple’s
hand. And if you can’t find what you want at all, then find folks with a
similar beef and do it yourself – like the Firefox browser, which has
stolen almost one third of that market in three years.

So in many ways brands are faced with similar issues to the beasts that
sit in the middle of the industries that TCS have been tackling. And
as the deep rough of blogs, video-communities, podcasts and other
network media becomes more grizzly big brands are starting to get that
Gulliver feeling.

So What To Do?Jeff Jarvis puts it neatly. “The real opportunity is not to start a
social network but to better enable the social network that the
internet already is.”

Ditching the 2.0 jargon for a second, what we are talking about is
helping people speak to each other about things and issues that
interest them. Which creates community, which creates goodwill, which
is good for business. Which is what TCS have done twice over and are
trying again with Joost.

What Did TCS Get So Right?Firstly, they saw that communities create modern brands. If I like a
product I’m extremely likely to recommend it to my friends and spread
the good feeling I have as a fan. It may be done at quite a trivial
level but, nonetheless, the connections are there, slowly being built
by people without the consent of the brand or its masters. Sometimes
marketeers chewing on the community question set the bar way too high
imagining that their brand communities must be equal to the
jaw-clenching, fist-punching fervour of say a football club – or,
indeed, the actors who appear in their advertisements. Sure, there
will be a few folks prepared to give it some extra oomph, but that’s
missing the point. As David Weinberger describes, the web is about,
‘small pieces, loosely joined’ - not bug-eyed fanaticism.

Secondly, TCS realised branding is no longer about the degree to which
you can own stuff but the degree to which you can foster and enable
networks. The software applications users need to download for Skype
and now Joost are universally applauded as simple and friendly. There
is none of the extreme control-freakery that you get with modern DVDs
where multiple warnings before the main show (whatever happened to the
popcorn?) make you feel like a criminal, rather than a welcome guest at
a particularly splendid party.

Thirdly, they work within the community as it forms, listening out for
useful suggestions and observations and delighting people by building
them into their rapid, agile product development process. It’s the
same view as the motto taken up by Guardian Unlimited, “Of the Web, not
just on the Web”. Or as MIT Professor, Henry Jenkins observes, "You
have to create a context where grassroots creativity is respected”.

Fourthly, they understand that P2P can scale – and scale big. The web
is no longer a bunch of geeky forums held together with string, but a
vast, sophisticated, open platform upon which everyday people enjoy
exploration, collaboration and fusing different tools together. And,
no matter how big or small you are, if you bring the right attitude,
your problems will be managing the volume of interaction, not theft or
lack of control.

Fifthly, TCS have understood and grasped the opportunities that a
networked world creates. This can be a problem for the Old Guard, who
may also understand the opportunities, but have so many chips riding on
the black of the past that switching to red can be a problem. IN CASE
THEY WIN. After all, how could a telecomms company create Skype? It
would decimate its own product-suite and profit stream. (For more
about that conundrum, see Clayton Christensen’s Innovator's Dilemma).

A Very Human BusinessAnd finally, and probably most importantly, TCS have always understood
that they are in the people business. The technology makes it happen –
but the people bring it alive. And if brands realised this, and this
alone, they might start to share in a bit of the P2P magic that has
allowed TCS Friis and Zenstrom to scale such incredible heights.